Would you say that minimizing the client accomplishes the same thing speed-wise as switching it to Performance Mode? The reason I ask is because I'm wondering whether adding a check box under Options for "Start in Performance Mode" would essentially be a duplicate of "Start Minimized".

If there is a difference, would the option to start in performance mode be a good addition to the client?

Would you say that minimizing the client accomplishes the same thing speed-wise as switching it to Performance Mode? The reason I ask is because I'm wondering whether adding a check box under Options for "Start in Performance Mode" would essentially be a duplicate of "Start Minimized".

If there is a difference, would the option to start in performance mode be a good addition to the client?

It's basically the same performance-wise, because both reduce the amount of screen updates so your GPU can mine instead. If you have 4-5 gauges being updated on the screen you can see some slowdown.

I think starting in performance mode can still be useful though. I'll add it to my list.

Currently I have 2 (0.08%) rejected and 2,431 accepted in the block rounds. And I have 0 rejected and 545 accepted in the current shift.

I'm not sure what's causing some workers to get high stales still. I'm working on some ideas to lower stales further though.

Anyone who is running BitMinter client and haven't restarted it since we switched server, please try shutting it down and starting it back up. Then it will connect directly to the server in Germany, instead of going to the US and then through a tunnel to Germany. This could improve stales somewhat.

Looks like some local network issues were part of the high stales. Now i'm at 0.35%. I hope it will continue to fall.

New version of pool backend up today. Big performance improvements. GPUmax took the server to 220 GH/s total and I could barely see any load.

Last problem to fix for the pool to work better with GPUmax is to get better in sync with the big pools. GPUmax uses their long polling regardless of which pool they are mining at (it doesn't watch our long poll at all). This has to do with how work from different pools gets sent through GPUmax to the same miner, and a long poll signal from them to that miner would cause it to throw away all the work, regardless of which pool it is from.

Anyway, that's a GPUmax specific problem. For normal miners we can now take a very high hash rate. So fire up every machine you've got!

As always with big changes on the system, please let me know if you notice anything wrong.

For my bitcoin username, my BTC reject rate is about 0.4% but it's 5.5% for NMC. I have 2 x 5830's a 5850 and a 6950, all running about the max overclock i could get. You know of any reason my NMC reject rate is so much higher than my BTC reject rate and the pool reject rate? Are my overclocks not as stable as I think they are, lol?

For my bitcoin username, my BTC reject rate is about 0.4% but it's 5.5% for NMC. I have 2 x 5830's a 5850 and a 6950, all running about the max overclock i could get. You know of any reason my NMC reject rate is so much higher than my BTC reject rate and the pool reject rate? Are my overclocks not as stable as I think they are, lol?

Reject rates now seem very different from user to user. Currently I have 12 (0.02%) rejects from 36 hours of mining. That's on BTC. On NMC I have 1 reject (0.01%).

High rejects could be not only stales but also invalid shares due to overclocking too high. The BitMinter client will show a count of miscalculated proofs of work (next to the bomb icon), and not send them to the server. I believe DiabloMiner also detects miscalculations. What happens is the CPU double-checking the proofs of work generated by the GPU. Not sure about other miners. Some miners might send them to the server which would result in rejects.

The NMC rejects always or often being higher than BTC rejects might be the miner ignoring long poll notifications because it sees the bitcoin block isn't changing to using a new parent block hash. BitMinter client won't do this, and I believe new versions of cgminer won't do it either. Or do you need to use an option for it to work well with merged mining?